Hello all, I was at an Oracle presentation regarding Solaris 11, and they did mention a number of features which I think appeared after the code split. Some sound like ideas simple enough to be recreated without using their source and just make a look-alike, with any other conincidence being purely coincidental.
The main question is IMHO legalese FUD: if we go this path and recreate in illumos from scratch look-alikes of nifty features and minor improvements that were created elsewhere, are such works vulnerable to lawsuits? It was interesting to learn also that ex-Sunnites at Oracle are (sad to be) forbidden to even look at alternate post-split OSes so as not to become "tainted" by the knowledge, and that any import of the code is also forbidden - if needed, things can and must be recreated in-house as original works. The main concern is post-SCO debacle: if someone posts non-original work into illumos claiming it's their own, and then Oracle takes it as CDDL code, and then the original/new IP owners sue the world... this is what Oracle wants to avoid. Not that they are inherently evil and arrogant (well, not everyone - to be sure). So, the main question of this post is: in legislations that are relevant and actively applicable to illumos-derived OSes such as OpenIndiana, are *ideas* and technical specs (meaning public-API/config compatible but code-different implementations) patentable and protectable, or are coders allowed to implement on their own things that others created somehow else? Among the features that looked interesting and might be missing in the open-source releases are: 1) ZFS dataset encryption, as is long discussed and longed for by community members and users; 2) Shadow migration (and/or hierarchical-storage-management sort of overlays) that allows userdata to be reorganized between datasets and whole servers transparently to users, who can bang their read-write IOs against the storage server farm or local disks during the migration process. 3) Immutable zones (several levels of immutability, with part of the zone filesystem being read-only) - basically we had much of this implicitly with sparse-root zones, but the new feature is a configurable attribute of the (fullroot) zone and allows to permit writes to /var+/etc, to only logs, or to nothing at all, basically. 4) Automatic VNICs for zones - if I got it right, if a VNIC if referenced in config of an exclusive-IP local zone and is missing in global zone Crossbow config, the VNIC is spawned temporarily during zone boot and torn down at its shutdown. 5) An enhancement to "zoneadm" that allows to gracefully shutdown a local zone from GZ (essentially "zoneadm shutdown {-r}" seems like just a shortcut to "zlogin zonename 'init 5{6}'"). Of course, there are hundreds more of features that were not even touched in the presentation, but of those that were - some of the above look scriptable and simple; others less so, but still quite useful. MAY they be implemented for illumos-gate/OI? Thanks for ideas, //Jim Klimov _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss